Hi devs, I've got two things I'd like to share with you:
First, I got a Buildr talk accepted at ApacheCon EU in Sinsheim, Germany, which I held just yesterday. I got a lot of positive feedback, people seem to like the buildr idea although it also seems that Maven improved since the inception of Buildr and some things are less worse. The most visible argument against buildr was, however, that people are used to use Maven and that, if they want to make their project accessible for a broad audience, they think they'd need to stick to Maven. I guess Gradle tries to address this issue by providing a "gradle-wrapper", which is a small jar file along a shell script that you can include into your project and that will bootstrap a gradle installation automatically. I also figured, that still many Java developers don't have rubies at hand and don't know how to easily install a gem. Anyways, it was a great conference with great people, so I can highly recommend visiting it or submitting a Buildr talk to the next ApacheCon (e.g. NA, deadline is Nov 11, the CfP of the Apache Daily track also mentions Buildr). Second, I stumbled upon ThoughtWorks TechRadar [2]. In particular, I liked the first paragraph of the Tools section ;) Tools Of all the build tools and languages we use across our projects, the one we keep coming back to is Rake. Rake is a beautiful, simple and powerful build language implemented as an internal Domain-Specific Language on Ruby. Ruby’s ability to run across several virtual-machine platforms means that Rake is equally available - while leaving open the option to utilize more language-specific tools for some tasks. Finding a similar combination of elegance and flexibility is difficult regardless of your platform, so we recommend trying *Rake for Java and .Net projects*. Two things have caused fatigue with XML-based build tools like Ant and Maven: too many angry pointy braces and the coarseness of plug-in architectures. While syntax issues can be dealt with through generation, plug-in architectures severely limit the ability for build tools to grow gracefully as projects become more complex. We have come to feel that plug-ins are the wrong level of abstraction, and prefer language-based tools like *Gradle* and Rake instead, because they offer finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term. They see Maven in the "hold" category, which means: proceed with caution. However, I have no idea why they don't see Buildr as the tool of choice :) Best, Tammo [1] http://na.apachecon.com/cfp/ [2] http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/technology-radar-october-2012 -- Tammo van Lessen - http://www.taval.de
